As the highly transmissible Omicron variant wreaks havoc in the US, more than 1.08 million people across the country tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday – a global daily record, data from Johns Hopkins University revealed.
The deluge of infections is forcing government officials, employers and citizens to weigh their risk tolerance as Americans enter year three of a devastating pandemic that has upended lives and livelihoods.
Although evidence suggests Omicron is generally more mild and less lethal than other strains, the volume of new cases has been followed by an increase in hospitalizations, threatening to once again overwhelm beleaguered hospitals.
Medical experts are sounding the alarm that the Omicron wave could be particularly harmful to children, as pediatric admissions of patients with Covid-19 reach record highs.
“This narrative that it’s just a mild virus is not accurate,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN.
“We’ve just done a terrible job vaccinating our kids across the country. So even though there’s a lot of happy talk about the Omicron variant, less severe disease, when you add up all the factors … we’ve got a very serious situation facing us in this country, especially for the kids.”
Monday’s number of new cases was almost double the previous record of about 590,000, set four days before.
While delays in reporting over the holiday period may have played a role, the new record could be a significant underestimate. Many Americans are relying on tests taken at home with results not reported to authorities.
Amid the deepening crisis, schools and businesses are facing difficult decisions. Classrooms in cities including Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Atlanta are closing as infections soar, opting for virtual learning or delaying students’ return.
But the move toward online education has become one of the greatest dividing issues of the pandemic. Officials as politically polarized as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and New York’s new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, have vehemently defended in-person learning, even amid the surge in cases.
“We want to be extremely clear: the safest place for our children is a school building,” Adams said.
Omicron has also created chaos in the economy. Thousands of flights have been canceled or delayed amid staffing shortages, many Broadway shows have had to cancel performances after positive tests, and hospitals and emergency response departments including police have been left understaffed as workers call out sick.
Some companies hoping to return to the office in 2022 watched the first Monday of the year come and go as they instructed employees to work from home for at least another few weeks.
Others are keeping their doors open by reducing quarantine periods for workers, according to new and controversial guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Monday night, Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in uptown Manhattan, tweeted about how the new wave of hospitalizations was “different” but “scary”.
“Today it seemed like everyone had Covid. Like, so many,” he wrote, after leaving an emergency department filled with Covid patients.
“And yes, like before, there were some really short of breath and needing oxygen. But for most, Covid seemed to topple a delicate balance of an underlying illness.
“It’s making people really sick in a different way.”
Diabetics with the virus were, he said, going into diabetic ketoacidosis – “a serious and life-threatening condition” – while many elderly patients feel too weak to walk.
Covid patients were being placed in beds beside cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or others who are immunocompromised, Spencer wrote, causing even more concern.
“The next few weeks will be really, really tough for us,” Spencer wrote. “A lot of healthcare workers will get sick. We will have to work short-staffed and take on more patients.
“If you haven’t been vaccinated or boosted yet, now is really the time. It makes a difference. I know you’re tired of this. We are too. But we’ll really need everyone’s help to get through it, again.”